How To Participate

Ever wish that you could cook your own currency? Well, this is kind of like that! Bartering is back, baby!Divide & Savour is a food swap project that gives you the opportunity to share the food you love to make and trade it with similarly-minded others for their homemade goods. Imagine it as a take-away version of a potluck – instead of chowing down on all the food at the swap, you can bring it home with you and have home-made, prepared food at the ready for the week to come (or weeks if your portions are freezable!).

Use the swap as an excuse to try that quiche recipe you’ve bookmarked, or to flaunt your famous cinnamon buns. Get ready to whip it up and dish it out.

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How to Participate

Dig up the recipe for a dish you love to make (or love the taste of so much that you forget about all the work that goes into making it). Hearty soup? A comforting casserole? Quirky salads-in-a-jar? Delicious muffins? Stellar. Make a copy of the recipe that you can share with the group.

Prepare your dish and separate it into servings. Wrap them up as portions for swapping. Label your portions with your name, the ingredients, and the date you made it. (Labels will also be provided at the Divide & Savour swaps.)

Come to the event to swap your portions for the food brought by other people – and go home with a bunch of completely new things!

You can bring as many servings as you’d like. The golden rule is that you can take home up to the same amount of portions that you bring to the party. This basic rule will ideally keep things in check and as fair as possible. We’re suggesting 5 servings, but feel free to bring more or less.

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A few friendly guidelines:

– Home-made foods are the bomb, so please bring those only. Don’t worry – you don’t have to be Julia Child to come to the swap! What you bring does not have to be fancy at all.
– Food safety and allergens ain’t no joke, so we are going to have a system that makes you responsible for the quality of the food you bring. We ask that you provide us with a full name, phone number, and email address should any emergency questions arise.
— Here is a link to food safety basics: http://www.befoodsafe.ca/en-home.asp There is an auto-start video so mute your computer if those annoy you.
– Pre-package the food you’re bringing in reusable jars/tupperware/old yogurt containers/etc. Be a good human and write down what day you made it on the container.
– If you’d like to be extra sweet, please bring one extra serving so that people can sample at the swap!
– Try, if possible, to lean towards vegetarian/gluten-free/healthy-ish foods. We’d like to try to be as inclusive as possible! You’re more than welcome to bring whatever you’d like, but the more inclusive your food is, the more people you can swap with.
– Portion sizes can be tricky. There are some simple ones, i.e. 1 cup of soup = 1 portion. In terms of baked goods, like cookies or muffins, perhaps 2 or 3 = 1 portion. Try to be fair and think about what’s equal.
– There’s no minimum or maximum amount of $ you need to spend on a recipe. If you feel like putting lobster and fancy cheese in your dish, cool. If you can make something delicious on a budget, awesome! It’s all up to you. Have fun with it!

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And, finally – the recipes! Bring with you one copy of the recipe that you used to make your delicious creation so that we can have a hard-copy on hand to swoon over as we chat. We can also use that copy to help spot and clarify any idiosyncratic directions that may have been jotted down.

We then ask if you could email in your recipe to divideandsavour@gmail.com (pretty official, right?). We will then create a (paperless! wahoo!) database of all the recipes on this website. Then you can check out all the recipes after the food swap and re-create those delicious dishes at home.

Welcome to Divide & Savour!

Divide & Savour is a food swap community in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Explore this site to read about the food that inspires us and the recipes from the swaps, as well as collaborative consumption projects that operate in the same sharing spirit.